You know why I'm great at my job? Because I'm sweating like a racehorse in this get-up and you can't tell.

French artist Alex Pinon knocks this cover for the spy thriller Mission spéciale à Rio out of the park with his black clad femme fatale and backdrop of Guanabara Bay and its famed Sugarloaf Mountain. Since Rio's average daily temperature never drops below 80 Fahrenheit, no Brazilian would actually dress like this, at least not during daytime, but the art is great. The book was published by Société des Éditions Nouvelles Valmont and its author called himself Commandant René. You're probably assuming that's a pseudonym, and you're right. It was used by Jacques Dubessy, Guy de Wargny, Henri Certigny, and other authors. Between them they wrote more than thirty books as this Commandant person, with the above coming in 1959. We have a lot of French art in the website, so poke around if it interests you. We'll have more soon.

Never cross a woman who's spent her life on the wrong side of the tracks.

This beautiful poster was made to promote the film Vagabunda, aka Tramp, a made-in-Mexico melodrama that premiered there today in 1950. It stars Leticia Palma, who befriends and falls in loves with a priest played by Luis Beristáin who's lost his memory as a result of an assault and robbery. Palma, who works as a fichera in a place called El Tropical, takes in the priest and dubs him Carlos. A fichera, by the way, is a term to describe a female nightclub employee who does things ranging from dancing with clients to having sex with them. Palma is already in a precarious situation working a dead-end job while sheltering the priest, but things get worse when she ends up being coerced into street prostitution by a gangster named Gato. Shortly afterward, a series of events lead to the killing of Palma's pregnant sister, and she vows vengeance upon those responsible.

The poster, which is one of the better ones we've seen of late, was signed by someone named Mendoza. So off to the intertubes we went to try and ferret out his or her identity and we found that this was the work of Leopoldo Mendoza Andrade, an acclaimed illustrator who worked throughout the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. His striking promo art uses tracks as a motif because those and trains figure prominently in the movie. For example, the priest is assaulted while riding in a boxcar, and a climactic scene takes place on a railway bridge. Mendoza may have painted more than 300 hundred posters, but this surely must be one of his best. His work can be difficult to find because attributions are scanty, but his signature is easily identifiable and his Art Deco-influenced style is unique, so we'll keep an eye out for more of his creations.

The images above come from the collection of digitized Los Angeles Examiner photographs curated by the University of Southern California, and they show murder victim Patricia Steel in a passageway between two garages in the Westlake area of Los Angeles. The case left barely a ripple. Other than the photos and skeletal biographical facts we found online, no detailed information exists about this killing in any archive we checked. That's the way it sometimes goes in the naked city, that the most critical moment of a person's life occurs, passes, and is forgotten. Today, 1952.

Patricia Knight made only five motion pictures, but one of them was 1949's Shockproof, which falls into the category of under appreciated film noir. She plays an ex-convict who moves in with her parole officer. Yeah—bad idea, but no need to say more because we already talked about the film in detail. Check here. Knight married her Shockproof co-star Cornel Wilde and, except for a few more roles, that was pretty much the end of her career. But her contribution to film noir is remembered as one of the better ones. This is a promo photo from the movie, 1949.

Suspiria is a legendary giallo, praised by horror fans and mainstream critics alike, and slated for a splashy 2018 remake. The fact that it's being remade is understandable—from Hollywood's perspective it fits with action and horror movies such as Turistas, Hostel, A Lonely Place To Die, Land of Smiles, Taken, et al that over the last decade or so have warned Americans that horrific things will happen to them if they travel overseas. In Suspiria an American dancer gains admittance to a prestigious West German ballet academy, but arrives just in time for a nightmarish series of murders. Jessica Harper stars as the ingenue trapped in this mostly blood red dance academy, a stranger in the strangest land, beset by unexplained illnesses, hallucinatory events, and vicious nocturnal terrors.

Suspiria piles the horror stylings on—from Dario Argento and his surreal direction, to Luciano Tovoli with his baroque lighting schemes and supersaturated colors, to the maggot wrangler who produced many more maggots than could have been reasonably expected, to the scorers (Argento among them) who came up with a percussive and discordant soundtrack that could rattle a bomb disposal robot. The first murder is nothing short of operatic, complete with a shot of a knife piercing the victim's exposed heart. The only real question going forward is whether Argento can possibly keep reaching such heights. And the answer is Suspiria, its brilliance outshining its flaws, is a classic for a reason. The poster above is a classic too. It was painted by Mario de Berardinis to promote the film's premiere in Italy today in 1977.

We think Shockproof has one of the best film noir titles of all time. It just sounds like a killer flick. But is it? Patricia Knight stars as paroled murderer who can't quit her past associations, despite the fact that her parole officer Cornel Wilde is prepared to throw her back in prison for life if she violates her terms. But she thinks she's smarter than the system, and so does her shady boyfriend, so they keep sneaking around Los Angeles to meet each other. Meanwhile Wilde is convinced Knight is redeemable, and in his efforts to steer her straight ends up bringing her deeper into his own circle, and into his personal life. The only way he can keep her away from her bad boyfriend is to be with her as much as possible, so soon the two are living in the same big house along with Wilde's mother and little brother. But the old boyfriend is still sliming around and plans to use Wilde's affections for Knight against him. We wouldn't say the movie is quite as good as its title—it isn't down and dirty enough for that—but it's a solid film noir entry, and we recommend it. It premiered in the U.S. today in 1949.

Italian actress Luciana Paluzzi looks convincingly lethal sporting a Remington 1000 shotgun in this promo shot from the James Bond thriller Thunderball—though she's so small we suspect if she fired it she'd somersault backward into the ocean. But in the film she handles the gun just fine as Fiona Volpe, a member of the murderous spy cartel S.P.E.C.T.R.E. Most Bond aficionados consider her one of the top femmes fatales of the series, and we agree. The image dates from 1965.

Junko Mabuki is an important actress of second generation Japanese S&M movies, and that's her above on a poster for Dan Oniroku onna biyoshi nawa shiku, aka Female Beautician Rope Discipline. What you see is what you get here. Junko meets a photographer who shoots bondage and discipline. At first she's repulsed, but, this being a roman porno flick, the thought of it grows in her mind. Meanwhile we meet Izumi Shima, one of the photog's bondage subjects. Junko soon crosses paths with Izumi and is attracted to her—and who wouldn't be?—but it's just the beginning of a descent into degradation, jealousy, and serious male-driven pee-version.We're still trying wrap our heads around the various forms of Japanese cinema. Toei's pinky violence films usually had cool ’70s street action and ass kicking gang girls, whereas Nikkatsu's roman porno had submissive women and sexual subjugation. They're all generally considered to be pink films, along with output from OP Eiga and other studios, but to us they're night and day. Pinky violence and roman porno represent two big studios in competition with each other, but more and more the patriarchy smashing ethos of the former feels like a rebuttal to the latter. In this one, though, the sadistic photographer gets his—spoiler alert!—head deservedly bashed in. Dan Oniroku onna biyoshi nawa shiku premiered in Japan today in 1981.

Above, an Italian poster for René Clement's classic drama Delitto in pieno sole, which was originally made in France as Plein Soleil and is known is English as Purple Noon. The movie, you may already know, is based on a Patricia Highsmith novel and tells the sinister story of the psychopath Tom Ripley. The poster art is by Averardo Ciriello, a prolific illustrator of not only movie promos, but also paperback covers and comic books. Click his keywords below to see more, and you can see another brilliant poster for Plein Soleilhere.

The Creeper, which premiered in the U.S. today in 1948, has a sinister, attention-getting poster, which you see above, but the film is long on atmosphere and short on frights. It concerns a doctor trying to develop bioluminescence in human organs so they're self lighting and will make surgery easier. You read that correctly. He wants to make organs glow just in case you need to be cut open one day. But instead he ends up, through his experiments on cats, creating a beast that slinks around mauling people to death. We never see an entire killer kitty—that wasn't in the budget it seems—but we do see cheap stuffed animal paws fearsome razor sharp claws. Ultimately The Creeper is a mood movie—which is to say, if you're in the right mood it may work for you. A six-pack could help get you there. Something even more psychoactive could get you there faster. But even then we can't guarantee you'll enjoy it.

Great Britain signs over Hong Kong to China in an agreement stipulating that
the colony be returned to the Chinese in 1997. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher signs the Joint Sino-British Declaration with her Chinese counterpart Zhao Ziyang, while political groups in Hong Kong push futilely for independence.

1912—Piltdown Man Discovered

A hominid fossil known as Piltdown Man is found in England's Piltdown Gravel Pit by paleontologist Charles Dawson. The fragments are thought by many experts of the day to be the fossilized remains of a hitherto unknown form of early man, but in 1953 it is discovered to be a hoax composed of a human skeleton and an orangutan's jawbone. The identity of the Piltdown forger remains unknown, but suspects have included Dawson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Arthur Conan Doyle and others.

1967—Australian Prime Minister Disappears

The Prime Minister of Australia, Harold Holt, who was best known for expanding Australia's role in the Vietnam War, disappears while swimming at Cheviot Beach near Portsea, Victoria and is presumed drowned.

1969—Project Blue Book Ends

The United States Air Force completes its study of UFOs, stating that sightings are generated as a result of a mild form of mass hysteria, and that individuals who fabricate such reports do so to perpetrate a hoax or seek publicity, or are psychopathological persons, or simply misidentify various conventional objects.

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